If you could provide more specific information to me on what would be beneficial/useful to FOIA, I'd be more than happy to take a look, and likely send them -- and put them up on a public Github repo with a license that makes the data useful.

Email me -- arthur [at] dantonio [dot] co [no M].

jonathan [dot] j [dot] mason [at] gmail

Straight off the top, one problem is that transcripts aren't routinely generated, AFAIU. Yes, there's a court reporter taking down the proceedings, but what's generated isn't itself directly intelligible. Preparing an actual transcript from the proceedings for a small (2-day) case can run close to a thousand dollars. Doing this at scale would likely be highly expensive.

You bring to mind an alternative though: an automatic, random, appeal of a select number of cases to a review system of some sort. This might initially be a completely random sampling across all courts, but could then be subject to some sort of stratified sampling, with more cases subject to review from areas highlighted as problematic, and periodic reweighting.

Digital audio can be more difficult. Automated transcription sucks, and the costs for human annoyed machine transcription are very high.

That said, the records I've seen have been accurate.

Your AI solution would 1) tremendously reduce consts and 2) almost certainly remove a large share of the income of these independent reporters.

Mind: the problem could be resolved by making reporters employees of the court.

Get drunk and drive off the road into a corn field, well if you can get out without anyone noticing then no big deal.

One particular combination showed a 10x increase in correlation with charges being significantly reduced or dropped.

It would be very interesting to see a proper dataset and analysis on this type of information.

So let's say this is the case. There are a lot of stupid people in this country, I might be one of them (the term is imprecise. Do behavior disorders call under that category?). What do we do about (to/for) these people? We can't find a better way towards a well functioning society than beating and jailing people?

Many of these criminals (especially drug sellers or users) are a manifestation of the cycle of poverty and mental illness while the court systems seem to make it worse instead of offering solutions for the community.

My solution is to deal with poverty as a whole, to reform the justice system, to recognize that we can give people the freedom of a basic standard of living so they do not have to live in crushing desperation. And the rest of us do not have to live as unwilling accomplices to an horrific system.

Combined with some of these other accounts, that's more or less the definition of structural racism, isn't it?

There are a number of other posters who hit the nail on the head. The problem is really with how we fund the courts. More volume needs to equate with proportional increase in resources.

That doesn't necessarily imply it isn't racist. There is such a thing as indirect discrimination. http://blog.oup.com/2015/07/indirect-discrimination-us-uk-la...:

"Indirect discrimination occurs when an apparently neutral rule or policy has a disproportionate and adverse impact on a protected group, and supposedly neutral policies become suspect unless they can be shown to be necessary for achieving legitimate goals. For example, prohibiting headgear (which would affect Sikhs), imposing a minimum height requirement (which could exclude women), or requiring a graduation degree (in a social context where a particular racial group has very few university graduates)."

In this case, one may wonder why courthouses in poorer neighborhoods aren't as well maintained as those in richer ones, and why, if the court is overloaded with cases, there aren't more judges applied to it. _If_ that's because of a rule "a courthouse per X citizens", one could argue that's indirect racism.

However, that same blog post seems to indicate that US law isn't that strong in making "disparate impact" illegal, if the impact isn't intentional.

Not being from the U.S. or another common-law country, I'm tempted to ask: isn't this a natural outcome of the common-law principle "by lawful judgment of his Peers"? I.e. peers in Bronx are, on the average, quite different from peers in a wealthy white suburb.

I realise someone might take this as mocking but that is not my intention. I see it as a genuine problem in common-law systems. This then exacerbates other problems of equality. (If I'm a well-to-do expatriate who comes to work in New York, would I pick a place to live in this Bronx neighbourhood? Likely not. But, in a way, anyone who does not want to be a "peer" in such an area is just as guilty of creating the situation.)

They are professionals assigned to a court and are supposed to be impartial.

http://www.uscourts.gov/judges-judgeships/code-conduct-unite...

Also, IANAL, but "lawful judgement of his peers" sounds like it is related to trial by jury, not common law, I think you are mixing up two very distinct concepts.

EDIT: And finally, most court cases are not going to be judges making new common law decisions, but simply applying existing ones. The issue we are talking about is that in the US it is not being done fairly in criminal courts in some areas.

Spread the available resources around.

Passive aggression and resentment. The implicit loathing of a compulsory task.

The article is written by a volunteer. She finds the scenario repulsive, because there is stark contrast between her optimistic anticipation of a rewarding display of civic work ethics, and the dismal reality of thankless routine with no hope of escape and no end in sight, for anyone caught in this whirlpool of limbos pointed at hell. Neither the law, nor the victims, nor the accused may leave, all inclusive.

Taking a punitive mindset and trying to use it against the only population of participants who might have a glimmer of choice in the equation could backfire, with profoundly terrible side effects.

Use the lack of choice implicit in jury duty as a bellwether, to gauge the realistic level of enthusiasm any given non-adversarial participant carries into a court room. Not your own, but the observed ambient enthusiasm jury duty enjoys.

Like mercury concentration in seafood, that disposition likely magnifies, with ascent through the food chain.

This article is one judge's visceral reaction to a cavalcade of nightmares, on day one, going in cold. Now ask her to do it again, and again, and remain gagged, holding her tongue as she did in the article, and prevent her from acting in favour of any change. Her enthusiasm would choke and die after six months, although it would probably take longer to strangle any hope she harboured.

But the parade of misery curls around the block, and is longer than one judge's reaction or hope. It's a problem that's bigger than knee-jerk gut reactions. A direct attack on the situation might go all kinds of wrong.

An organisation of volunteers would really be a better strategy. This article highlighted one hotspot that needs volunteers to augment the workload, and the treatment of the cases. A conduit for volunteers, such as an exchange program to aid circulation, and help rotate operators of the system between duties (easy and hard), might improve results. It would need a monitor to ensure improvements are real.

If there's a strong link between the judge and the DA, eventually you will run into a problem with power. This is if you survive the initial onslaught of please of desperate help from desperate people (not all of whom will be paragons of virtue).

At that time, the political pressure brought to bear will be immense.

This reminds me of the recent case where the public defenders office attached the Governor to a case because of the constant budget cuts to their department.